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Apologies to Sondheim and Lapine for the updated title on this article.

Veeam announced their “Endpoint Backup FREE” product in the wee hours of the morning Wednesday, as about a thousand attendeees of the first-ever VeeamON user conference were still recovering from the event party at LIGHT nightclub in Las Vegas. More on VeeamON in another post later… but let’s get back to the new product for now.

Nope, this isn’t a hangover. Veeam, a leader in virtual machine backup/recovery and disaster recovery technology, is stepping out of the virtual world to allow you to back up bare metal systems. From early comments, this has been a long-awaited feature.

Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE

Endpoint Backup FREE is a standalone software package targeted at IT professionals and technophiles for use on standalone systems with local or networked storage. It should fit into anyone’s budget, and with flash drives and external USB drives coming down in price, none of us should have an excuse not to back up our personal laptops and desktops anymore (I’m talking to me here).

Veeam offers an “Advanced Recovery Disk” that enables you to do a bare metal restore to a point in time. With some products you can restore from a backup image to a new disk or replacement computer, but you have to install and patch your OS from scratch first. Other products may limit you to local storage, or require driver alchemy, but with the Endpoint Backup recovery disk, you can boot from it (i.e. USB flash drive or optical media) and restore your full system image from a network share on your LAN.

Hey, can I back up a million Windows Servers with this product?

No, you can’t, and you shouldn’t.

Veeam are using a specific term in the product name–endpoint–to distinguish this offering from a bare metal server backup product. While it runs on Windows Server 2008 and later (as well as Windows 7 and later on the desktop side), it is being developed as a client OS backup solution. It does not have any central control or client management functionality, as it is a standalone program. This model doesn’t really scale for a large number of systems.

However, if you’ve virtualized all but two or three servers in your environment, or if you run a small number of physical servers in a home lab, this can cover that gap without having to license an additional enterprise product for a small number of legacy servers. You can even use a Veeam infrastructure as your backup target, whether backing up Windows Server or the standard desktop offerings.

Also, at this time Veeam does not support mobile devices (iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Sybian, Tizen, etc) so it is not a universal endpoint solution. You’ll want to either use your platform’s cloud option or something like Lookout or a carrier-specific app to back up your tablets and phones.

What are the downsides to this new product?

Well, the main thing for me personally is this (courtesy of Rick Vanover’s vBrownBag talk this morning):

It’s not available yet. Veeam employees are doing an alpha test now. A public beta is expected in November, with general availability (GA) offering in early 2015. However, for me it’s not that bad as it will take me a couple more weeks to have any free time, so for once I can probably wait patiently.

Another thing, which will probably affect a few of my readers:

That’s right, no Macs. At launch, and for the foreseeable future, Endpoint Backup FREE will only support Windows systems. Today there is no Linux or Mac OS X support. You can of course back up the Windows VM on your Mac with this product, but you’d have to use one of the server products to back up Linux, and if customers request Mac OS X support enough, they will likely consider it down the road.

And a fifth thing, that builds on the previous item:

For reasons that should be obvious, Veeam has chosen to support only current Windows OS revisions. Windows 7 and later and Windows Server 2008 and later will be supported.

XP is out of service, and Vista is, well, Vista. Windows Server 2003 goes out of service next year. So for most users this will not be a major hindrance, but if your home lab has a lot of old Windows OSes, the Endpoint Backup FREE product will probably not fit your needs. And you should use this as an excuse to start upgrading (as if you needed any more reasons).

So where do we go from here?

It’s going to be an interesting year coming up, in the PC backup world. Veeam has a long history of free products, going back to their first product, FastSCP from 2006. Many technologically savvy end users will probably try out the new offering and then be tempted to check out Veeam’s other products if they haven’t already.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see this functionality integrated and expanded into a paid/enterprise grade offering in Veeam’s future, incorporating feedback from the beta and first production release of Endpoint Backup FREE. There’s some logic in expanding from there to supporting bare metal servers in a scalable way as well. If Veeam follows this path, the other big backup players may end up with a bit of heartburn.

Disclosure: Veeam provided me with a complimentary media pass to attend VeeamON 2014. No other consideration was offered, and there was no requirement or request that I write about anything at the event. As always, any coverage you read here at rsts11 is because I found it interesting on its merits.